Free In Guilty Night by Alison Taylor Page B

We prefer Freud and his excuse theories.’
    McKenna smiled. ‘Despite appearances, you’ll become a criminal if you get in your car with all that whiskey sloshing round in your belly.’
    ‘Who’s to know except you and me?’
    ‘What if you hit something?’
    ‘And what if I don’t? I’m not the bizarre collection of subconscious impulses Freud described as a person. I’m aware of my limitations.’
    ‘Not all psychiatry is problematic, Eifion.’
    ‘I’ve yet to be convinced. If Elis was buggered in public school, and abused Arwel, the shrinks’ll argue he can’t help repeating a learned behaviour pattern, so he’s not wilfully hurting anyone.’
    ‘Lombroso’s theory has the same inevitability.’
    ‘He never overlooked choice. Child abuse is a choice, an aspect of recreational sex, as Dai Skunk could tell you. It’scertainly not a biological imperative.’ Dr Roberts drained his glass. ‘By the way, that bleeding lesion is Kaposi’s Sarcoma, and Jack’s convinced the HIV virus is airborne. He’s too terrified to listen to sense.’

4
    Morning brought simply another absence of night, and a dense obscuring fog off the sea. Looking from his window at blankness, unrelieved by even the ghost of a shape to confirm the continued existence of his world, McKenna thought of the fog as an entity, pressing against his windows for ingress to his house and his throat and his lungs, suffocating and life-stealing. Great beads of icy dew hung from the lintel above the window and dribbled like grease down the glass. He lit the gas fire, hunched on the edge of the sofa, nursing a body riotous with pain. The cat leapt up beside him, and made a ball of herself in one corner.
     
    Doris Hogg sat on the hard bench fixed to the wall of Blodwel’s cloakroom, hunched inside her dressing-gown, feet bare and blue with cold inside the grubby carpet slippers. She shivered, watching the boy who sat on an identical bench fixed to the opposite wall, tearing his nails until blood seeped from the quick, gnawing his knuckles until the crude blue letters tattooed on the flesh turned purple. He stared at the cheap dirty trainers on his feet, waiting and listening, and heard the dog scratching at the locked door to be allowed in from the fog.
    ‘I’m hungry,’ he said.
    ‘You had breakfast.’ She shuffled to the door to let in the whining dog, clothing creased around her rump, a crude embroidery of varicose veins behind her knees.
    ‘I only had cornflakes.’
    ‘You’ll get something later.’
    The dog sidled in with wisps of fog about its body and dew beading its hair, snuffled at her feet, then at his, and because it was Hogg’s cur, the boy wanted to kick it back out and over the hill, to repay the animal for the cruelties of the master.
    She sat again, the dog slumped by her feet, their breathingnoisy, adding to the strata of smells in this room and the building, which would haunt the rest of his days, he thought, like the memorable lessons so painfully learned. Hunger groped at his innards, nausea wormed in his gut, wriggling amid undigested cornflakes and weak tea, like the vein in the woman’s foot, wriggling like a sandworm whenever she changed the locus of pressure.
    ‘I feel sick.’
    She yawned. He heard the wrench of jaw muscles and the clicking of teeth. ‘Be sick, then. And you needn’t think they won’t come because of the fog. It’s clearing already.’
    He swallowed the bile, and stared through the window. Wisps of fog wriggled in and out of the thin trees behind Blodwel, torn by a little wind. The dog yawned too, tongue curled up inside its mouth, then snatched at the end of her dressing-gown belt, pulling open the garment to reveal snagged pink nylon clinging to her navel and the rolls of flesh around belly and waist. ‘What was that you said?’ she snapped, as he muttered under his breath. She sneered. ‘You’ll get your comeuppance! You won’t be running away again in a hurry.’
    ‘Maybe I